


every wolf's and lion's howl

by honey_wheeler



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-17
Updated: 2012-05-17
Packaged: 2017-11-05 12:52:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/406589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mormont women care little for flowers or song or romantic gestures; that's what your mother always told you when you were a girl. Their hearts are not won by soft words, their heads not turned by handsome faces. But give them a good man leading an army into battle and they’re smitten.</p><p>You always thought it mostly nonsense – you and your sisters are all so different, how could you have hearts so alike? But then you'd followed Robb Stark to war and you hadn't been so sure after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	every wolf's and lion's howl

**Author's Note:**

> **Major spoilers for ASoS/Season 3**.

Mormont women care little for flowers or song or romantic gestures; that's what your mother always told you when you were a girl. Their hearts are not won by soft words, their heads not turned by handsome faces. But give them a good man leading an army into battle and they’re smitten.

You always thought it mostly nonsense – you and your sisters are all so different, how could you have hearts so alike? But then you'd followed Robb Stark to war and you hadn't been so sure after all.

You’ve known him most of your life. Your mother had taken you with her occasionally to Winterfell where you and Robb had played the roles of eldest and heir together, nodding at each other with a gravity so beyond your years that it strikes you as comical now. You’d seen him at tourneys sometimes, or weddings. You’d always liked him. But it wasn't until you'd ridden at his side, fought at his back, clasped his hand in victory that you'd thought to fall in love. You believe in him, more than anything or anyone, and you'd follow him into any hell man could devise.

You’d never expected to feel such things for a man. There had been no girlish dreams of romance in your head when you were young, you’d harbored no burning desire to wed. Mormont women take their mates where and when they will. Your own mother has joked of you being sired by a bear so often that you almost forget it isn’t true. You’ve no need to make a marriage for the good of your house, nor do your sisters. You have a path that can be taken alone and it’s something you’ve always been grateful for, a gift from your mother and grandmother, their mothers and grandmothers before them, a debt that’s probably poorly repaid by falling so deeply in love with a boy King that your heart drops to your feet each time you see him and your skin prickles like you’ve jumped into an icy stream at the mere touch of his hand.

You should be wary of such all-consuming love, of such a deep-moving river that would never let you ford. Instead you fall headlong and you let yourself drown and you don’t care.

He is unspeakably kind, so excruciatingly honest and honorable that you want to tell him to guard himself, to protect his person and his heart. To save it for himself rather than give it whole to his people. But he would not be who he is, then, he would not be the one you love, so you determine yourself to guard them for him, placing yourself in his service with more devotion than you’ve ever felt for anything bar your sisters. It gladdens your heart too much that he accepts you happily, unquestioningly, ignoring the pointed looks and muttered remarks from the few of his men who feel it wrong. He ignores them and it only makes you love him all the more.

They look at you sometimes, those same men who questioned your presence. They stare as if to see through your clothing and you hate them, almost as much as you pity them. Robb looks on you as an equal, as a friend, and it touches you even as it leaves disappointment settling over your skin like mist.

He is drunk the night he first touches you as anything other than a friend and a fellow, the night he first kisses you. He’s had far too much wine and he’s listing and dizzy with it, reminding you that he’s still barely more than a boy for all that the mantle he wears is that of a man. He looks at you guiltily when you find him in his tent, cringes before you as if you’ll remonstrate him or remind him of his duties. You only shoo his lady mother away when she comes looking for him, saying that he sleeps, protecting him from the sting of motherly judgment, allowing him to still think himself a man.

“You are far too good to me, Dacey,” he says, and you love the way your name sounds on his lips, his voice surrounding it like a caress. He leans close to you, touches your arm, walks his fingers up to your elbow to trace feathery lines over the veins that hold suddenly rushing blood. “Sweet Dacey,” he says, “lovely, strong Dacey,” and then he’s kissing you, and if you’d ever held any illusions that you loved him only as your liege lord and your king, they would go up like dry tinder touched to an open flame the way every single speck of your body does at the touch of his lips to yours.

His kisses are sweet and clumsy, mostly inexperienced. Wine drifts sour-sweet on his tongue as he pushes it to meet yours, falling into you, the press of his body inexpert and perfect. “Dacey,” he says, breathing your name into your mouth, “my fierce, beautiful she-bear. You could destroy me with the swipe of your paw.” You frown, confused, caught between the sweetness of his kiss and the strangeness of his words. 

“I would never harm you, Your Grace,” you say, fervently, ardently, your heart living in your voice, and he pulls back to look at you, to touch one battle-roughened fingertip to the notch of your upper lip where sweat gathers damp and light.

“No,” he agrees. “No, and yet you’re dangerous to me.” He kisses you again before you could speak any words, and there are no words you’d want to say more than you want his taste in your mouth again, so you only kiss him back, counting your heartbeats until they’re too fast to separate, until they blur into each other the way his body blurs into yours.

You expect his regrets the next morning, his rejection and his recrimination, but he finds you in your tent where you have retreated to give him space, he finds you and he kisses you like to climb inside you. He pushes his hands beneath your clothes and he breathes your name and you swallow it, wanting to keep it forever. There will be no regrets, not just now, not yet.

He is only ever the same with you before others, his words are polite and respectful. He listens to your council, fights at your side. It’s only when you’re alone that what is between you becomes something else, something urgent and pliant and needing. You hide it from everyone, so carefully you could almost fool yourself when he looks at you no differently than any other as you pour over maps or treat with defeated lords. Your mother is not so easily fooled, though. You’ve never been able to hide anything from her, and she sees through your skin and muscle to your insides, as if your body was made of glass. “You mustn’t,” she does not say, “he is promised to another,” she does not remind you. She only says, “be careful with your heart,” and you would try for her if only it weren’t too late. She doesn’t blame you. She knows what it is to love a thing too wild to be kept on a leash.

You are the first woman he lays with, you know that without asking. He is yours before he is this Frey girl’s, and it’s almost enough. He lies within you, holds you sweetly with his weight, pins you to the bed like an anchor dropped into the sea. It takes him more than one try to give you the release he finds so easily, too easily, but it doesn’t matter to you. You’ll take whatever he can give and you’ll make it into enough.

“Do you love me?” he asks you once, and your response is automatic, unthinking.

“Of course, Your Grace,” you say, always mindful, no matter how alone with him you might seem, and he grimaces at the title, at your care and evasion.

“I do not ask you as a king, Dacey,” he says, “but no matter. Your answer could not serve me, no matter what it is.”

You tell him your answer anyway, as you lay with him in the dark of the night; you tell him with the touch of your hand, with the yield of your body to his, with the strength of your embrace as you hold him against you and within you, of course I love you, it seems I have only ever loved you, and maybe I only ever will. You kiss him as if you could pour your soul into his body, as if you could gift it to him and keep him safe always.

When he rides out to the Crag, is it like any other day and any other battle. When he finally comes back, looking pale and wasted and heartbreaking, it is with a wife. You want to scream, you want to cry, you want to touch him to make sure he’s real and strike him with your fists. But the love that fires your anger also douses the flames and you can only watch him with his wife and think it would be better if you could hate him.

You speak of her with him only once, only one weak moment in a sea of stronger ones.

“You would lie with me a hundred times and keep your vow, but lie with this girl once only to marry her,” you say, and your voice is more accusing than you’d like, more wounded than feels safe to show. Robb looks almost as wounded, and you want to take your words back, want to take back anything that’s ever caused him pain, and it makes you feel foolish, that you would put his heart so above your own.

"She's not like you are," he says.

"And what am I?" you ask, and want to hear him say it almost as much as you can’t bear to know.

"Strong," he says. He kisses your forehead, your cheek, holds your shoulders as if to keep you together. Then he’s kissing your lips and everything you’ve ever felt wells up within you and threatens to spill over like a flooding stream. The kiss grows drugging and deep and he wrenches away from you with a groan to leave your lips cold and wanting.

"I am sorry, Dacey," he whispers against your cheek, "I truly am,” and you believe him, is the worst part. Then he's gone from your tent and you’re alone again but more alone than you ever managed to be before.

And then he isn’t yours anymore, if he ever was. He never touches you again. He wouldn’t dishonor his wife, and you hate him for it even as your love won't be shook, until your head swims and your skin aches from contradiction. You watch him with the Westerling girl, see how he dotes on her. How his face folds in consternation when she shrinks from Grey Wind, despite his best efforts to reassure her and the wolf both. It leaves a strain between them, between Robb and Grey Wind, and it hurts your heart to see. Grey Wind finds you among the tables, he snuffles at your fingers and butts his head against your hip, and you know Robb sees, you know it leaves him confused and unsettled. Look how this girl you've chosen shies away from the heart of you, you want to say. Instead you dig your fingers deep in Grey Wind's ruff the way you knows he likes, you feed him choice bits of liver and lung from your knife. You stroke his head when he lays it on your knee and you watch your King with soft eyes as you lavish the affection you would keep for him on his direwolf. He watches you in return and you could swear you see him shiver when you rub the silken patch just behind Grey Wind's ear, making the fur along his spine stand up in response.

You’d like to hate Jeyne, but you can’t hate her and you can’t blame her. She's a sweet thing, soft-hearted and eager to please. Nothing at all like your sisters but still you feel some affection for her, some urge to protect. It's not her fault she's all wrong for Robb, that she's set some irrevocable force into motion, a force that has its wheels grinding somewhere under your feet so you can feel the vibrations in your teeth. There is unrest among the men, there are whispers and grunts and shadows gliding like unknown beasts under the surface of a lake. It makes you uneasy, makes you always alert, and you begin to keep to yourself, needing to sift through all the pieces in your head to try to make them into something whole and recognizable. Robb notices your absence, he frowns at your distance and seeks you out more than he should.

"Have you some secret suitor?" he asks once. You hold the edge of jealousy in his words to your breast, keep it close to warm your skin on the nights you spend alone in your tent.

"I have no secrets from you, my King," you tell him, and it's wretched in its honesty, but you can be no less with him.

The ride to the Twins is uncomfortable, laden with tension and worry. Jeyne follows them out, pleading in her girl’s voice, pulling Robb’s mind away from where it needs be. You see the scowls of the men and in your head you urge Robb to hasten, to remember himself. His mother seems to feel the same tension, the same worry. When she tells Robb to keep Grey Wind close, you agree, adding your voice to hers, but Robb cares too much for courtesy, he holds where he should give and gives where he should hold.

You barely feel the axe as it sinks into your stomach. You blink your eyes and see only the quarrels in his shoulder and his leg. You hear the men rushing in, hear the surprised shouts and the sounds of betrayal. There’s a gurgle in your throat, a sound you’ve heard too many times on the battlefield to mistake its meaning. It worsens, grows deeper and wetter. You’re glad you won’t live to see him die, you think, and it’s all you can think, all you’ll ever think again.

 

_title from Auguries of Innocence by William Blake_


End file.
